Beginners Guide to Skiing: Stopping

            Learning to ski is often hard for many people. This is because the learning mechanisms required to ski often contradict some of the lessons that many learn on similar conditions of ice or snow. It is natural instinct to want to move slowly and carefully over the snow to avoid slipping, or while driving to make slow and steady turns while on ice. While skiing however, there are many differences that I will explore here.

When first learning to ski, we learn the basic principles of pizza and French fry. French fry means the skis are parallel to one another, and pizza means the skis point towards one another coming together at the tip. The forces of physics that apply to make these distinctions possible are conservation of energy and non-conservative forces (friction and drag). With French fry position, the force of friction is minimal as the skis lie flat on the surface and the surface, mostly ice and snow, has a very low coefficient of friction. Therefore, when in French fry position, the majority of the skier’s initial potential energy from being at the top of the hill will be transferred into kinetic energy in the form of motion at the bottom of the hill. During French fry position, the only real force against the KE of motion is drag, which is a result of the air pushing against the frontal facing portion of the skier. Using the pizza method to stop greatly increases the friction of the skier, as they turn the skis on their edge and towards one another, the frictional force is applied opposite the direction of motion and the skier will slow down. 

More advanced stopping techniques use different principles that often seem to contradict the typical methods of stopping while on ice. As we know, stopping a car while on a slippery surface, it is important to gradually apply the brakes while at slow speeds without turning the wheels to reduce the amount of slipping. While skiing, a hockey-stop, or side stop is an abrupt swivel and hard push down the hill while cutting the edge of the ski into the snow at roughly a 45-degree angle. This hard stop allows for the snow to apply a large frictional force on the skier to abruptly stop their forwards motion. For skiers not fully ready for the hockey stop, another method of coming to a stop is utilized called the J-stop, which involves turning your skis back uphill until the KE returns to PE, traveling back up the hill in a sweeping J formation.